INDIA - Haryana Tripla's parents sold her for US$295 ($480) to a man who had come looking for a wife.

He took her away with him, hundreds of kilometres across India, to the villages outside New Delhi.

It was the last time she would ever see her home.

For six months she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her out into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla's parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears.

"But what could we do?" she asked him. "We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her."

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls, because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death.

In the villages of Haryana, just outside New Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that there is a drastic shortage of women. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from poorer parts of India.

Just 40km from the glitzy shopping centres and apartment complexes of New Delhi, there is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn baby and offering to arrange an abortion. India is trying to stamp out the scourge of female feticide. But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done.

Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a financial burden: the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better employment prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female fetuses have been aborted that there aren't women for the men to marry. The result is a thriving market in women known in local slang as baros, who have been trafficked from poorer parts of India.

Anyone in the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3000 rupees ($109) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman. Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual brides only. Sometimes, brothers share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a beautiful "bride" will sell her on at a profit.